8 Hegel’s POS Force and Understanding 2
00:00 / Some announcements.1:00
2:00 / Professor Bernstein has rewritten his lecture on FU to fill in the gaps.
3:00 / we are re-framing the question of FU from what Adam gave to professor last week.
first 2 steps to the frame:
first our reading of Hegel’s phenomenological method in which we can phenomenologically look on, we can look can because consciousness examines itself. And consciousness examines itself because
4:00 / every form of consciousness poses its own conception of truth, what Hegel calls in-itself, and a corresponding conception of knowing, what cognizing that kind of that kind of in-itself must be like in-itself, this, the form of knowing, SC.
and we suggested that this method, the way in which there is an internal relationship between it-self and fore-consciousness, truth certainty, is in fact nothing but a generalization of Kant’s Copernican Turn, in which self-consciousness relates to objects, by projecting upon the world a concept of an object in general.
5:00 / so my operating assumption all along is that we Kantians have that idea i.e. we face the world by projecting upon it some concept of an object in general, and the phenomenological methods that we assumes that for every possible form of consciousness.
second frame of thought. The entire chapter on self-consciousness i.e. SC, Perception, and FU, those 3 forms of consciousness, all of which are called consciousness by Hegel. What makes them all consciousness is that they are pre-Kantian and hence pre-Copernican in their assumptions about how they relate to the world.
6:00 / and each of those 3 forms assumes that there is an in-itself, the this, the object of perception, the one and the many, and force that it is the ultimate matter of fact that makes knowledge true.
now to say that these are pre-Kantian or pre-Copernican makes it sound as if they are making a dumb mistake. But they are not.
so we want to step back and say that what is important about these forms of consciousness, what they are assuming is in-fact deeply intuitive.
namely what they are assuming is that the fundamental structure of knowing
7:00 / involves us in matching our representations to the world. So the world is the measure of our knowing. And hence the world is the measure of truth.
as oppositely now
so the world and then the knowing world relationship. The world determines knowing. So the direction is from the world to knowing.
as oppositely we suppose, and this is why this is deep, in action, we assume that we determine or make the world.
8:00 / that is, we make the world correspond to our plans, ends, desires, goals, needs.
and this structure that the direction of knowing runs from the world to mind, while the direction of action runs from mind to world is the difference between knowing and acting.
that in knowing we are trying to get our representations correspond to the world. While in action we are trying to get the world to correspond to our actions. Which is why Marx got so upset with Feuerbach.
9:00 / so the overwhelming assumption is that how knowing differs from action is in their fundamental direction. That the direction of knowing is that the world determines me, and hence there must be a deep stratum of passivity in the phenomenon of knowing in order for objectivity to be possible.
while conversely the direction of action is that I determine the world, hence a fundamental stance of activity. So knowing and action are different stances towards the world as if in knowing we
10:00 / contemplate the world, that is why it is often thought of as contemplation, and in action we make the world.
so now looking at this structure it may look familiar to you since in fact we often think that this way of thinking, this passivity gives us the idea that the world determines mind causally. While action determines the world through freedom.
11:00 / and we look at that structure, suddenly it starts looking at Kant’s third antimony, where every cause has another cause, no cause without a first cause. And we will come back to this structure in a moment.
but the thought here is that consciousness is playing out this stance. Consciousness is assuming this structure which is just the intuitive, traditional, classical structure of the difference between knowing and action. and it makes just one or rather two further assumptions.
first that I am in the world and hence I have a world
12:00 / only through my representations of the world. So that its representations that gives me a world in general.
and second that the fundamental meaning of knowing is that the world determines me and hence I am passive with respect to the world.
Force and Understanding in this setup is hence the scientific picture of this structure and hence the idea that the meaning of consciousness is being given by a certain kind of representation of the world namely the kind of representation of the world that is assumed in modern natural science.
13:00 / But also in reasons that we will come to in a moment in Plato. Plato and modern natural science share many similar structures.
so those are the two background assumptions governing this set up.
An aside.
as we will see later the structural view that knowledge in the last instance requires a stance of passivity and action in the last stance requires one of absolute activity
14:00 / that structure, world determining me, me determining world, exactly as is the structure of Kant’ 3rd antimony on causality and freedom, and is equally the structure of the first 2 chapters of the phenomenology.
this is structure of consciousness as a whole and this is going to be the structure of self-consciousness as a whole, action determining world. That is where we are going.
now both views are false. You knew that was coming.
and unlike Kant
15:00 / what Kant does is say that both views must be true. And in order to make both views true, he draws a line between them, and calls this side phenomenon [FILL] and this side noumenon.
and that is how Kant solves or preserves the ultimate structure of this way of doing things.
Hegel is not going to resolve this antimony by adopting a notion of noumenal freedom. He is going to argue that consciousness cannot sustain its posture of passivity---this is what we will read about today why consciousness is forced into become a stance of agency.
16:00 / but we are equally going to discover that self-consciousness is going to have to acknowledge absolute dependency or passivity.
so this is a complicated story here. but roughly we are going to join these and their joining is going to be reason.
so we are going to get a different resolution to this fundamental deep structure. and we are saying that this deep structure is very much the structure of what knowledge means.
And if you read analytical philosophy they assume this structure all the time. This is what analytic philosophy is all about, this structure, and how the two sides hang together and its all variations on the Kantian solution.
17:00 / or even worse just subsuming this side into that side, just making it all passive, just make it passivity all the way down.
even Sellers this becomes the manifest image and this becomes the scientific image and it becomes incoherent at that very point. And Sellars knew this. He has something called FILL where he tries to worry about this problem.
okay end of the aside. that is the structural setup.
here is the third moment, which Prof. Bernstein was reminded to say, the third element of the framing.
18:00 / Hegel supposes that despite the fact that all of consciousness is pre-Copernican and despite the fact that our method itself is Copernican, what Hegel is trying to do in the chapter on consciousness is phenomenologically demonstrate the necessity of the Copernican Turn.
he wants to demonstrate how consciousness cannot sustain its fundamentally passive stance and it cannot continue to deny its own constitutive role in making objectivity possible and that it is somehow---and here is the problem you were all suffering with last week---
19:00 / that it is somehow forced, made, pushed to turn upon itself and to take responsibility for its knowing. Now we put it this way---it is forced to take responsibility for its knowing, we are not saying it is forced to become active because consciousness has been active almost from the beginning, but it explicitly becomes active already in consciousness. It is active when it says I am responsible for falsity, but it just tries to make that activity non-constitutive of the conditions of objectivity.
so the shift is going to be
20:00 / it must acknowledge the constitutive role of its activity i.e. its responsibility---and we will get to this in a moment---for articulating the relationship between identity and difference, the one and the many.
this is the kicker. We must demonstrate the necessity of the Copernican Turn, and it is interesting that Hegel takes this as his job because it is exactly what Kant did not do and thought could not be done.
on the contrary if you recall
21:00 / Kant introduced the Copernican Turn as already happening. As a conjecture or hypothesis, in his terms. So he does not demonstrate that we have to turn, he asks that, and now quoting from B16 in the introduction:
We must therefore make trial [a] whether we may not have more success in the tasks of metaphysics if we suppose that our objects must conform to our knowledge. That they must conform to us not we conform to them.
[a] We must therefore attempt.
22:00 / This is an extraordinary thing to say. The Copernican Turn is asking or rather demanding that knowledge, the world must conform to it.
you might be thinking that Kant is looking weirder by the second.
but of course only at the level of form not at the level of content. The form is the concept of the object in general, the world-hood of the world, that is what we project. The actual content often comes from the world. Nonetheless that is the thesis. So he says a page earlier in the introduction when he is actually talking about how he is reading modern science,
23:00 / Bxiii
“They learned that reason has insight only into that which it produces after a plan of its own, and it must not allow itself to be kept, as it were, in nature’s leading strings…”
that will be the conclusion of Force and Understanding. We get insight only after a plan of our own.
so that is the frame.
so we have to demonstrate the necessity of making the Copernican Turn. But of course it is slightly question begging because
24:00 / again it is a Copernican methodology that will lead us there.
we should be clear about the set up, a reasonable frame of problem anticipating. Then let us now move to the puzzle.
now this is where Professor thinks he screwed up last week.
what kind of failure is occurring in Force and Understanding. What kind of defeat does this form of consciousness undergo and why, to push this thought even further
25:00 / why does this form of failing force it into Copernicanism. That is the micro-grain of argumentation that we have not yet gotten fully perspicuous. And we will try to make this perspicuous now.
in Sense Certainty, just as a reminder, the failure occurred, the nature of the failure occurred because consciousness could not achieve the determinacy that its own stipulation, its notion of the in-itself, required.
26:00 / so it kept wanting to say this and the this never appeared. So the indeterminate, the determinate pointing always become the indeterminate and indeed the universal.
the former failure in Perception is different. This is kind of interesting all by itself and we ought to be thinking about how the different forms of consciousness fail and they will fail differently.
the form of failure in Perception occurred not because of lack of determinacy, the determinacy was given by the complex of universals, that is how objects are determinate. It failed because it could not hold together the two components of its concept of an object, the one and the many.
27:00 / That is it could not figure out how the determinacy from the many was the many of a one.
so what it could not think is the word of. Why are these properties of the thing? It could not hold that together and it kept falling apart.
the most important thing to notice about the one in the chapter on Perception is that it is a bare substratum. That is, it was not itself actually a perceptual item.
28:00 / but rather it was kind of a posit or pre-supposition necessary to hold the many properties together.
why is that important? It is because Hegel is being sneaky. What he is doing is little by little phenomenologically introducing the idea that in order to have a determinate cognitive awareness of an object or an event, there must be some feature of that object or situation namely its oneness, what makes it a determinate one that is not itself perceptual or sensible.
29:00 / think of Hume or Locke, they have a lot of stuff going on, but they cannot figure out the notion of one. They cannot figure out the notion of one because the notion of one itself is not another perceptual item. Which of course is what Hume was thinking that there is no idea of the substance, there is no idea of the underlying.
but the opposite thought should be ticking away which is Kant’s thought. That indeed the one is not another perceptual item. And therefore the necessary condition for the possibility of object awareness is that there be a
30:00 / non-sensible one collecting or holding together the sensible many.
in the handout from Kant FILL there is any place where he is making the Copernican Turn. Is there any place in CPR where Kant actually does the Copernican Turn, it is A109. and professor wrote half on this passage which is favourite passage.